Garlic and Sapphires (28 page)

I crossed out the squid and substituted baby octopus. My pencil slashed through the insulting egg rolls and replaced them with steamed scallops in the shell, with XO sauce. I left the chicken, but asked for shark's fin soup instead of winter melon. I put Dungeness crab with ginger and scallions where the lobster salad was, and replaced the fried shrimp with live boiled ones.

“I sort of like the idea of the flounder,” I told Carol. “Do you think my honor will be compromised if I accept it?”

“You can't change everything all at once anyway,” she said. “You have to leave something for the next go-round.”

“Okay, but the steak kue, whatever that is, has to go immediately. And Peking duck—does he think I'm a fool? In a Cantonese restaurant? I'm asking for red-cooked pork belly and crispy chicken.”

I watched the fax slowly move through the machine and take its message off to Flushing. Ten minutes later I had my reply.

Raymond offered fried soft-shell crabs in place of the Dungeness. He didn't have any baby octopus and he wondered if my guests were going to be happy with the pork belly; perhaps I'd like to try some roast baby pig?

“You can't have the pig and the crispy chicken,” Carol pointed out. “Maybe you should change the chicken to something more elaborate.”

Each time a dish changed, the entire menu had to change with it. It was an oddly pleasurable process. After the first flurry of exchanges everything slowed down, and for a few days we proceeded at a languid pace, a relaxed Ping-Pong of flying faxes. When it was all over I had raised the ante (shark fins are expensive), but the chairman was going to get a spectacular meal.

I called Joe's secretary and left the message that I had found the restaurant and finalized the menu. When, I asked, did Joe want to have the banquet?

She called back to request a copy of the menu.

“He wants to see it?” I asked stupidly.

“That's what he said.”

I shrugged and put the document into one of those interoffice envelopes we were always being exhorted to use to save paper.

For a few weeks there was an ominous silence from the third floor. I began to worry. When Joe finally called, he was not reassuring. KB Garden Restaurant, he said flatly, would not do.

“Why?” I asked. “The food is wonderful.”

“Yes,” he said, his voice dry and unfriendly. “But I went there.”

“You actually ate there?” I asked, surprised.

“Yes,” he said. “It is not at all what I had in mind. Were you aware that they serve their banquets right in that enormous room? The food was good enough, I suppose, but we need something better for the chairman. We need a private dining room. You'll have to find another restaurant.”

“Does he think I have nothing better to do?” I fumed. “I don't have time to go running out to Flushing every day to find a restaurant just to please him!”

“Ruth,” said Carol, “you have time. Or you have to make time. Unless you want to have nothing
but
time. If you know what I mean.”

I did know what she meant, but I resented it. Everyone else treated me as if I were the Princess of New York and here was this guy reminding me that he was my boss, that I served at his pleasure. It made me prickle with irritation.

Each trip on the Number 7 train made things worse. I was following every lead, trekking out to Main Street every few days. But the places with good food weren't good enough for the chairman; they were too big, too cold, or too shabby. And the ones with décor worthy of such an august personage had food that was not fit to eat. I was in despair. Time was running out.

And then Ken Hom came to town.

When I first met Ken we were both living in the Berkeley flatlands on very little money, both madly in love with food. He had a reputation as both a cook and a tour guide. Poor people bragged about being invited to his house for meals. Rich people bragged about the remarkable tours he arranged for them in Hong Kong. “I always wished I had the money to go along,” I told Carol, “but eating at his house was pretty wonderful.”

“I've heard of him,” she said. “I think Craig mentioned him. He said he was a terrific cook.”

“He is, but now he seems to spend most of his time in France. He's got a fourteenth-century château he's been restoring.”

“Where'd he get the money for that?”

“He's England's best-selling cookbook author. He had some cooking show on the BBC, and his books sell by the millions.”

“But does he know anything about Flushing?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Probably not. But if anyone can find out, he can. After all, he was just a kid from Chicago before he became Mr. Hong Kong. Joe seems to think Flushing is just like Hong Kong, so I'm going to ask Ken to pretend that it is.”

Ken's publicist thought that a food tour of Flushing was a swell idea; she assured me that her client was well acquainted with Queens. I believe the words she used were “knows everything there is to know.” I doubted that, but I was certain that by the time we met, she'd make sure he did; after all, a story in the
New York Times
is every p.r. person's dream.

Ken arrived in a limousine. He jumped out, wearing what looked like a million-dollar suit set off by a long white silk scarf. “Look at you!” I said, kissing him.

“Look at
you,
” he replied, and we both burst out laughing. I climbed into the cozy car and promptly forgot that I was supposed to be the
New York Times.

“Can you believe that they pay us to do this?” I said.

“Shh,” he whispered, looking more like an excited adolescent than England's hottest celebrity chef. “We can't ever let them know that we would do this for free.”

Where did Ken find out so much about New York's newest Chinatown? I'll never know. He whirled me through Flushing as if he had grown up there, introducing me to men whose nicotine-stained fingers beckoned us into hidden rooms with tanks of improbable fish. He found fruit and vegetables I had never seen before in New York—durian, mangosteens, galingale—and women came whispering out of the darkness to offer mysterious packages of spice. We ate Sichuan food so hot that each bite sent shock waves through my body, and funky Fujianese dishes laced with musty red wine paste.

We drank beer and whiskey, and he beckoned me down rickety stairs into restaurants where mine was the only white face. Eating a bowl of soft noodles with a mysterious crunch, I discovered that the long white strands were laced with tiny crabs. As my teeth dissected another shell, I thought, finally, that Joe was right, this really was an Asian city, once you penetrated the invisible wall.

It was very late at night when we got to the Taiwanese restaurant. Was it the fourth meal, the fifth, the sixth? I had lost count, but I had also lost all interest in food. Undaunted, Ken ordered a platter of spareribs, and when they appeared my appetite came with them; they were thin and crisp, absolutely irresistible. Great bowls of beef and noodle soup, thick with five-spice flavor, came next, and I ate that too, along with bracing platters of clams with basil.

It was past midnight and customers were still coming through the door as the air grew thick with smoke and the strangely lonesome Chinese music grew louder. I thought that this would be the place to bring the chairman, but I knew I was only thinking that because it was late and I was tired and happy and filled with too much Chinese whiskey.

There was no traffic going home, and the road beneath us was an unbroken ribbon stretching back to the city, the wheels turning in a comforting thrum. “Let's have another adventure soon,” said Ken when I stumbled out of the car. “Come to France. Let me cook you a really fabulous meal. Just wait 'til you taste my duck!”

 

 

 

 

 

N
ice piece,” said Carol a few weeks later, when the article about my adventures with Ken appeared. “Sounds like you had fun. But wasn't the whole point to find a restaurant for the banquet?”

“How could I tell him that the places he took me weren't fancy enough?” I said. “I was embarrassed. I didn't want to insult him.”

Carol wasn't fooled. “You just forgot. You were having too much fun.”

I acknowledged this with a rueful smile. “Don't worry,” said Carol, “I've had another idea. The last restaurant in your article made me think of it. What about Taiwan?”

“What about it?”

“Did you ever ask any of the Taiwanese officials where to eat?”

It was an excellent notion. The people from the Taiwan mission to the United Nations were very helpful. The woman with whom I spoke said that her own favorite restaurant might be just what I was looking for. It was not large. And yes, if she remembered correctly, there was a private dining room.

Carol and I were on the next train.

 

 

 

 

 

F
lushing First Taste was small, with a kind of shabby elegance meant to convey seriousness. Cloths covered the tables and three solemn gods presided over the back of the room, which could be closed off for banquets, keeping watch over a locked case filled with expensive bottles of whiskey, Cognac, and Scotch, each carefully labeled with a customer's name.

The chopsticks were of good quality, a promising sign. And the dishes that we ordered—paper-wrapped chicken, crisp, tiny pork ribs, pea shoots cooked with eggs in chicken fat, steamed fish fillets in rice wine—were all wonderful. Carol and I looked at each other.

“Do you think?” I asked.

She nodded. “This,” she said, “is definitely the place.”

 

 

 

 

 

B
ut I had learned my lesson; this time, I took nothing for granted. I gave Joe's secretary the address of the restaurant and waited for his call.

When it came (he approved), I moved to the next step and began planning the menu. Remembering Diana's advice, I went back to Flushing for a meal and started the negotiation. And then the faxing began.

It took three days, but at the end I had a menu that was surprisingly similar to the one I had negotiated at KB Garden Restaurant. I proudly sent the final product to the third floor.

“You aren't going to believe this,” I told Carol a couple of days later.

“Let me guess,” she interrupted. “Joe wants to rewrite the menu?”

“He doesn't think what I've chosen is sufficiently splendid for the chairman. He's taken charge and everything has become fancier. Now there's abalone on the cold platter. We've replaced the squab with stuffed blue crabs and the duck with baked lobster. And instead of baby pig we're having salt-baked crab.”

“It sounds like it's all seafood,” she said.

“It is, pretty much. They're always the most expensive ingredients. But I have to hand it to Joe; we're going all out. The pièce de résistance is going to be dancing shrimp.”

“What?”

“It's a dish I've always wanted to try. They put live shrimp into rice wine and slowly heat it up. The shrimp die drunk and happy and according to everything I've read, the flavor is amazing.”

“Too bad you won't get to taste it.”

“Oh, I get to taste it all right. Joe expects me, and Michael, to be there.”

“Really? Who else is going?”

“Oh, nobody who counts. Just the chairman, the publisher, the managing editor, and Arthur Gelb. Remind me who he is.”

“That would be the great Arthur Gelb to you. He used to be the managing editor. Not to mention holding just about every other powerful job at this paper.”

“Yeah, I thought he had to be somebody big. Plus assorted wives. And us.”

“When will this feast take place?” she asked.

“Next Tuesday,” I replied, “September eighteenth.”

“Pray for a major news event,” she said. “It's the one thing that will save you. If something big happens, they'll have to call it off.”

 

 

 

 

 

O
n Wednesday, September 19, 1995, the
New York Times
published the Unabomber Manifesto. “You must have a direct line to Heaven,” said Carol when I showed up that morning. “You got your major news event. What a relief!”

I shook my head, and Carol crossed her arms and looked at me incredulously. “Don't tell me they all went anyway?” she said. “I don't believe it!”

“At six o'clock on the button,” I replied, “a small squadron of limousines pulled up on West Forty-third Street to take us to the great Flushing feast. I knew from the get-go that it was going to be bad: in the scramble for seats Michael and I got separated.”

“Oh no,” she said, “Donald would kill me. Who did he go with?”

When I said “Gene Roberts,” Carol winced.

The managing editor was a severe and awkward person, but when I saw Michael climbing into his car, I thought he and Michael might actually get along. Gene had a national reputation as a journalist's journalist. But I caught an occasional glimpse of their car as we inched our way forward in the agonizingly dense rush-hour traffic, and I could see that Gene was in back, Michael in front. Every time I saw them, Michael looked more miserable.

“He said Gene treated him like an imbecile,” I went on. “He apparently asked Michael what he thought of the paper's Whitewater coverage and then got mad at the answer. Gene's supposed to be such a straight shooter, and Michael never minces words. I'd have thought it would be okay.”